[jacquesm]

This goes for all infrastructure. Destroying it is much easier than making it. But that 'cheap' submarine won't be as cheap as you think it is and it still has to do it undetected and it has to achieve some kind of objective. It also immediately gets two countries pissed off at you, one of which is in NATO and may well see an attack on its infrastructure as an overt act of war.

So you better think this over long and hard before sending your cheap submarine down there.

Personally I'd be much more concerned about the kind of damage marine life, fishing and cargo ships would do to that cable and how to armor against that. Probably by the time you've taken all that into account you have also defended against that sub. And finally, the same thing of course goes for all of those other undersea cables, communications ones for instance.

[kkfx]

Under the sea who know for sure who made what? Even an ally can do such sabotage just to generate a military response against a common enemy he want to aggress but can't do without allies and those allies are not much interested if not forced or even a simple self-inflicted damage to justify a war the public do not accept but some in the government/élites want... Did you remember just Britannia to cite something from history or the outcome of the attacks of Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan and Nice have generated?

Such attacks can even disable half a country grid just due to the big drop in frequency of the whole grid, spark enormous outrage and can also be both really damaging and really quick to fix. Life it's complicated, where no one can easy see anything can happen, design things to avoid potential attack surface is a good way to protect themselves.

We do not normally have strokes, but we put defibrillators everywhere for a reason, we do not have much car accidents but we design cars to make us survive important ones etc. A critical infra like an energy grid... Oh, sure we in the west are equally dependent on foreign supply chains for oil, uranium etc but we stockpile them a bit, months for oil, an year or two for uranium, it's not the same of electricity in a grid...

Just see how many issues are there due to some supply chain issues in south China or the "Ever given" crisis in Suez. We are already hyper-vulnerable planning even bigger vulnerabilities for the future it does not sound that smart to me.

[jacquesm]

Conspiracy thinking isn't going to stop infrastructure projects from happening. For now. Fortunately.

[kkfx]

Classify normal prudence as conspiracy is a classic move from those who try selling freezers to the Eskimo, if we follow such line why having an army and keep radar-monitoring the country and it's surrounding? Why put defibrillators anywhere, why put fire-extinguishers etc, why even design electrical wiring with as much sectioning and breakers as we do?

Such "infra projects" are like, much like, the Desertech scam, a project to deliver p.v. from north-Africa to Europe able just to detour significant amount of public funds to a small set of private players. This one is just a bit smaller but essentially copy the same plot.

Other large infra projects, nearly 99% of all large ones, results in public money black holes for very limited results. At a smaller and more technical size we have had a period where anything must be big, after we learn that many small things are better than few big ones, that's happen for ship (with the sole exception of tourism), planes (777/A380 fiasco), giant road infra and so on. No conspiracy, at least if your vocabulary do not classify "economy" as "conspiracy" and rationality as plot.

Did you remember why we have switched from mainframes to cluster?

[jacquesm]

> Even an ally can do such sabotage just to generate a military response against a common enemy he want to aggress but can't do without allies and those allies are not much interested if not forced or even a simple self-inflicted damage to justify a war the public do not accept but some in the government/élites want...

No, this is not 'normal prudence', it is completely off-the-wall conspiracy stuff. If you think this is normal then that is really problematic.

[kkfx]

Did you read just last 100+ years history? Is it conspiracy? The Britannia was a conspiracy? Just to cite one. The public Cossiga statement (ancient Italian minister, well known criminal) that he like opposing manifestation because they are good target to few crooks who will crush cars, magazines, etc pushing the population against the protesters and justify the subsequent and purposely late police response, was conspiracy or history? Anne Morin classic "on war propaganda" to justify any crimes on their own side and depict the other side as diabolic and criminal is a classic book of propaganda or a conspiracy? Bernays campaign fro the United Fruit Co to overthought the legit and democratic government of Guatemala was history or what?

What you call conspiracy is normally named classic strategy by all who study and use it. So any normally prudent State do it's best to avoid creating potential threats potentially used against itself. Some do not just because those threats are corruption-fueled economy. And again we see countless examples in just the very recent history.

[jacquesm]

That something happened once doesn't mean you need to jump at every shadow or that you need to assume that every thing that we do needs to be hardened against every eventuality. Fortunately - for now - idiots in real life are still in relatively short supply. Contrasted with the internet where they are plentiful, witness the dumb attacks on mobile phone infrastructure once the crazies start to influence each other because 'they' are out to get them.

The cases you list are the exceptions, not the rule. Fact: undersea optical cables would be trivial to destroy. But as a rule they work well. Fact: water infrastructure, gas infrastructure and power infrastructure is vulnerable. But it actually works quite well. Fact: logistics infrastructure is fragile, as are most buildings. And yet, most of it seems to hold up quite well. Ok we get the occasional crazy person but that doesn't mean society grinds to a halt or that we are going to re-do all of our bridges, crossings and foundations.

[7952]

I think it is just plowed into a trench and covered back up.